My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), British historian. Published in World's Classics as Autobiography. Memoirs of My Life (1796).
This has also been misquoted with the phrase "decent obscurity," following a parody in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine of the time.

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The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), British historian. Memoirs of My Life, ch. 8 (1796), published in "World's Classics," p .212, as Autobiography.
Sometimes misquoted as "decent obscurity," following the parody in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine of the time.

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It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.